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Mass failure to start systemd units on 257.3-1 (with 3rd party glibc)

Description:

After upgrading to systemd 257.3-1 and rebooting, all systemd-related services fail to start.

Additional info:

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Have a working system based on systemd 257.2-2
  2. Upgrade at least the following systemd packages to 257.3-1:
  • systemd
  • systemd-libs
  • systemd-sysvcompat
  1. Restart/poweroff+on the machine

Expected result:

The machine boots into the normal user session.

Actual behaviour:

After rebooting, almost all service starts (including device mounting & networking) fail. The machine is dropped into a nonfunctional rescue prompt. Rebooting the kernel into rescue or emergency mode also leads to nonfunctional prompts.

I did notice after the systemd upgrade that a subsequent pacman command (pacman -R glibc-eac-bin) was hanging, so I terminated it and rebooted into the broken machine state.

Edited by James Upjohn
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